russia

In this immensely impressive work by Pulitzer prize winning author Anne Applebaum, we learn of a world eerily distant to us. As Americans, we have been rightly exposed to massive amounts of narrative, scholarly examination, and media views of the Nazi Holocaust. Yet, the decimation, abuse, and inhumanity that characterized the Soviet Union and her Gulag labor system for over 30 years seems to go unnoticed. This is perhaps for political reasons, as it may not serve certain political interests to have a communist nation take her place as the most murderous state in history. This conscious neglect may also stem from the fact that the horror is so distant, having taken place in the often frozen wastes of distant and always mysterious Russia. Whatever the reason, Ms. Applebaum has brilliantly cut through the ignorance on the subject and delivered an earth shattering look at one of the most brutal human institutions ever devised. Expertly weaving together the massive history of the labor system and the government structure that supported it along with the smaller stories from survivors, Applebaum gives the reader the total picture. It is eye opening in its authenticity and gripping in its historical intensity.

The first thing that should strike you about the book is how complex the story itself is. The history of the gulag is not as simple as the highly streamlined and relatively orderly Nazi system. Indeed, in the beginning of gulag development, the Communist justice system was as chaotic as it was cruel. When it became clear to Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders that they would need massive camps to place all their "class enemies", the system was slow to action. In combination with the realization that the wide swaths of mother Russia held massive amounts of natural resources however, the system began to become more orderly. Still, starvation, failure, and misdirection were the orders of the day. Only when Stalin came to power did the camps take on a new role, as a perfect tool for fear and oppression. Along with the NKVD, Stalin used the gulag to not only serve the Soviets economic needs (which it never truly did) but also to serve as the sword of his cult of personality. So many from so many different strata of society were jailed, and many of these people disappeared forever. More deadly than official execution, the gulags became houses of death because of bad working conditions and often barbaric living situations. The gulags developed into a fairly official way to keep the oppressed in line, but they also served to undermine the Soviet Union's national spirit. Even when the system was mostly dismantled soon after the death of Stalin, the gulags served as a bleeding wound to the image of the "worker's paradise".

This book is far beyond simple historical recreation however, it also deals with the human face of the gulag. While numerous and celebrated memoirs have been published in the United States, Applebaum expertly crystallizes these stories and creates a vivid picture of life in the gulag. We read gripping accounts of men, women, and even children ripped out of their ordinary lives and thrown into the vicious cycle that made up the Soviet forced labor system. The horror began at arrest, when the NKVD secret police would knock on the door in the middle of the night. Interrogation and transportation, usually under hellish conditions, added to the desperate condition of those arrested. All of these steps toward eventual internment are described with skillful tribute by Applebaum. Life in the camps was a mixture of terror and hope, as prisoners were forced to improvise in order to survive. New societies grew up in the gulags as more and more were shipped into them. The human form of the gulag was been written before, but never more crisp and readable than in this examination.

There is little praise that I can foist on this already heralded title. Gulag is a tour de force of hidden history, a world distant to us laid bare by the expert words of Ms. Applebaum. Along the way, we see almost every possible aspect of the gulag system, along with its Soviet overlords. The role of the guards and the position of various Soviet leaders and apparatchiks are also highlighted. Of course, Applebaum points out the fact that international outcry was consistently muted because of the political disadvantages of criticizing a communist nation. It is a lesson to be learned, and history not to be forgotten. History on an epic scale, not to be missed.

With the publication of "The Gulag Archipelago" in the early 1970s, Alexander Solzhenitsyn shocked and dismayed the Western world by masterfully detailing the existence of a horrific shadow culture within the Soviet Union, a culture comprised of a mass society of slave laborers scratching out their bare-knuckled survival in unbelievable difficulty and squalor, and having been recruited into the Gulag for a variety of economic, social, and political reasons. Given the inherent limitations of this superb albeit shocking fictional work, the West had to wait for the fall of the Soviet bloc for a more definitive and more complete treatise on the nature of the Gulag. This new book by scholar-turned-journalist Anne Applebaum represents such a work.

The work is both massive and comprehensive, dealing not only with the ways in which the Gulag came into existence and then thrived under the active sponsorship of Lenin and Stalin, but also with a plethora of aspects of life within the Gulag, ranging from its laws, customs, folklore, and morality on the one hand to its slang, sexual mores, and cuisine on the other. She looks at the prisoners themselves and how they interacted with each other to the relationships between the prisoners and the many sorts of guards and jailers that kept them imprisoned. For what forced the Gulag into becoming a more or less permanent fixture within the Soviet system was its value economically in producing goods and services that were marketable both within the larger Soviet economy as well as in international trade. As it does in China today, forced labor within the Gulag for the Soviets represented a key element in expanding markets for Soviet-made goods ranging from lamps to those prototypically Russian fur hats.

The Gulag came into being as a result of the Communist elite's burning desire for purges of remaining vestiges of bourgeoisie aspects of Soviet culture, and its consequent need for some deep dark hole to stick unlucky cultural offenders into to remove them semi-permanently from the forefront of the Soviet society. Stalin found it useful to expand the uses of the camp system to enhance industrial growth, and the camps became flooded with millions of Soviets found wanting in terms of their ultimate suitability for everyday life in the workers' paradise. Thus, the Gulag flourished throughout the 1920s and 1930s and even through the years of WWII, when slave labor provided an invaluable aid in producing enough war goods to help defeat the Axis powers. By the peak years of Gulag culture in the 1950s, the archipelago stretched into all twelve of the U.S. S. R.'s time zones, although it was largely concentrated in the northernmost and least livable aspects of the country's vast geographical areas.

One of the most interesting and certainly more controversial aspects of the book can be found in its consideration of the relative obscurity with which both the existence and horrors associated with the Gulag has been treated to date. Compared to the much more extensively researched and discussed Holocaust of Europe's Jewish population perpetrated by the Nazi Third Reich over a twelve year period, almost nothing is known about the nearly seventy reign of the Gulag. Given the fairly recent demise of the Soviet state, and the dawning availability of data revealing the particulars of the existence of the Soviet system of political imprisonment, forced labor camps, and summary executions, one expects this massively documented, exhaustively detailed, and memorably written work will serve as the standard in the field for decades to come. This is a terrific book, and one I can heartily recommend to any serious student of 20th century history. Enjoy!

This book underscores the evil that was and still is Communism. In a profound way it also celebrates the human freedom allowed by free-enterprise and capitalism. Communist states rely so much on forcd labor that they ultimately doom themselves to economic stagnation and finally the collapse of their government.

The Gulag system forced production for the state by isolating many of the best and the brightest, the very people who spurred success in the West, in forced labor camps.

This book demonstrates the Hitler's evil was not the only abhorrent system of government in Europe and the introduction shows that Western commplicity is why Communism is still, to this day, not roundly reviled.

An excellent book